Page 5 of Exchanged

“Enzo has been so excited for you to get here,” she blurts. “He’s been talking about it for weeks.”

“No I haven’t.”

I definitely have.

She ignores me. “Enzo, why don’t you give Garrett a tour? Show him his room. Help him get unpacked.”

“He probably shouldn’t unpack,” I say. “He’s leaving tomorrow.”

She gives me a look.

“But yeah,” I say, turning to him. “I can show you the guest room.”

Garrett hoists his backpack on his shoulder, grabs the handle of his luggage, and eats one last olive. “Thanks for all this,” he says, gesturing at the kitchen. “You really didn’t have to do anything special.” I can sense a small note of guilt in his voice, the sound of someone who isn’t where they’re supposed to be.

“Of course we did,” Aunt Liz says. “It’s a special occasion.”

He grants her his one-third grin and steps through the swinging door into the hallway. When I follow, I bump into his back. He’s standing still, looking around.

“Holy shit,” he says.

The front hall is the nexus of the house. The staircase winds around and above, and half a dozen doors open into various rooms. It’s nice, in an old-house kind of way: dark wood floors, tall windows, patterned wallpaper.

But what warranted a holy shit are the hundreds of items arranged on end tables and bookshelves and display cabinets in each room. An ornate mirror hangs on the wall to our left over a giant urn. A scarred violin is suspended from a hook on our right. Next to it sits a glass display case filled with dozens of teacups. Other items are spread out along every wall and into every corner of every room, all with white price tags attached to them.

Dad stands at the front desk, tapping away at the touchpad that rests atop our ancient cash register.

“Not a bad day,” he remarks as we draw level with him. “We finally sold that old sewing machine. Got full price, and replaced it with another big-ticket item.” He points at the door of the living room. In the corner where the sewing machine once lived rests a tarnished tuba balanced on its bell.

The upside to living in an antique shop: We have a cool massive old house that we couldn’t afford if it didn’t double as the family business.

The downside: Our cool massive old house is filled with other people’s junk. Ninety percent of the objects in our home are here temporarily, as if everything we own is borrowed. Once, when I was younger, I found a set of old cars and a racing track. I played with them every day for weeks, until one day they weren’t there. Someone had bought them as a gift for their grandson.

Garrett follows me upstairs. He pauses outside the open door of a bedroom filled with vintage clothing. A hat, a pearl necklace, and a moth-eaten dress that look like they once belonged on a 1920s flapper adorn a mannequin near the door. In a corner stands a rack devoted to old wedding dresses. We sell a lot of wedding dresses, which I’ve never understood. If I were a bride, I wouldn’t be able to shake the knowledge that its original wearer is in either a nursing home or the graveyard.

Garrett cocks his head. “How do you know which stuff is yours?”

I motion to three closed doors down the hallway. “We keep our bedrooms and the kitchen closed off. Other than that, everything with a tag is fair game. Like, our TV isn’t for sale, but the oak stand it sits on is.”

He points to a painting of water lilies in a gilded frame hanging on the wall to our right. “So I could just buy this off the wall right now.”

“If you’re okay wheeling it through airport security.”

“Maybe I like impressionism.”

I glance at it. It’s a Monet print. He plays football and knows things about art. Weird.

“It has a price tag,” I say.

“So nothing in this house is yours.”

“It’s all ours. Until we sell it.”

We walk past a bedroom used for showcasing antique toys, past the closed doors of Emma’s and Dad’s rooms, and arrive at a locked door at the end of the hall. I take a key out of my pocket, open the door, and begin climbing the steep stairs on the other side. At the top, we stand on a low-ceilinged landing.

“My room’s there,” I say, pointing to an open door on the left. I nod at the room across the hall. “Yours is there.”

To my surprise, Garrett walks to my door, leans against the frame, and looks in. I move to stand next to him, self-conscious of the things he might discover about me at a glance. This close, I can smell his deodorant, fragrant and masculine.